Roundup #4

Eric Cheyfitz: The Disinformation Age – Interview conducted by the Workshop for Intercommunal Study

“My meaning of disinformation is a real historical break in political discourse so that what begins to happen, and it is reflexive rather then conscious or planned by any particular entity, is that another history starts to emerge which itself is detached from actual history. That [detached] history takes hold and becomes the status quo in a particular nation state…What ultimately happens is that there is no longer a political vocabulary to deal with political realities so consequently problems can’t be solved and the status quo which, is increasingly an unequal status quo is exacerbated. And that’s where we are: we have intense income inequality in this country [The U.S] that is not being dealt with, we have endless war in this country that is not being dealt with and we have absolutely no language to address these issues.”

Community Building: An Idea Whose Time Has Come by James Boggs

“That is why the main question before us is “How can we become new men and new women?” willing to accept the challenge to live by the vision of another culture, a new culture we still have to create, a culture based on social responsibility and respect for one another instead of individualism and materialism and on a love for and kinship with the land and with Nature, instead of viewing Nature as something to be con­quered and land as a commodity to be owned? How do we create a culture that is life affirming rather than life destroying, which is based on caring and compassion rather than on the philosophy of the “survival of the fittest” ?

Record-breaking Climate Change Pushes World into ‘Uncharted Territory’ by Damian Carrington

“2016 saw the hottest global average among thermometer measurements stretching back to 1880. But scientific research indicates the world was last this warm about 115,000 years ago and that the planet has not experienced such high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 4m years. 2017 has seen temperature records continue to tumble….”

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit by David Graeber

“Americans do not like to think of themselves as a nation of bureaucrats—quite the opposite—but the moment we stop imagining bureaucracy as a phenomenon limited to government offices, it becomes obvious that this is precisely what we have become. The final victory over the Soviet Union did not lead to the domination of the market, but, in fact, cemented the dominance of conservative managerial elites, corporate bureaucrats who use the pretext of short-term, competitive, bottom-line thinking to squelch anything likely to have revolutionary implications of any kind.”